1. Technical Field
The present inventive concept relates generally to an electronic device such as a smart phone, a smart pad, a tablet PC, etc. that may be electronically locked and unlocked. More particularly, the present inventive concept relates to a method of unlocking an electronic device based on motion recognition, a motion recognition unlocking system for unlocking an electronic device based on motion recognition, and an electronic device including the motion recognition unlocking system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, as the security of an electronic device (e.g., a mobile device) becomes more important, various techniques for unlocking the electronic device have been suggested. For example, the techniques include a technique in which a user inputs a password to an electronic device by pushing a physical button or a touch button of the electronic device to unlock the electronic device, a technique in which a user moves a specific graphic that is displayed on a touch-screen panel of an electronic device to unlock the electronic device, a technique in which a user performs a drag operation on an image that is displayed on a touch-screen panel of an electronic device to unlock the electronic device, and a technique in which a user touches specific graphics (e.g., patterns) that are displayed on a touch-screen panel of an electronic device in a predetermined order to unlock the electronic device.
However, since these techniques require a user to physically touch (or contact) a touch-screen panel of an electronic device, the touch-screen panel may be damaged with the likelihood of such damage occurring increasing as the number of times the user physically touches the touch-screen panel increases. In addition, a visibility of the touch-screen panel may be degraded because fingerprints of the user are left on the touch-screen panel. For this reason, a conventional motion recognition unlocking technique in which a user's motion is recognized (by a sensor of the electronic device such as an accelerometer or gyroscope) and the electronic device is automatically unlocked based on the user motion has been suggested. However, the conventional motion recognition unlocking technique requires a great amount of user motion data. Therefore, electronic devices consume a lot of power and operate at a low speed when performing conventional unlocking techniques. In addition, the unlocking operation is unreliable because a great amount of user motion data must be produced and processed in deciding whether to unlock the electronic device.